this. I got into real trouble a few years ago by speaking my mind to my MD about the latest motivational posters which portrayed our business unit as a machine made of gears and cogs. I had two objections. One, people are not cogs. Two, the gearing system on the pictures wouldn't work. I got approbation because I was not "commercial enough" and also "not onboard" but the pictures stopped being made. So... a win.

The thing that strikes me is that engaged and experienced employees deal with rafts of problems silently, using their networks to create and co-ordinate responses without executive intervention. In fact executive intervention is actively avoided because there isn't enough time in the exec's diaries to communicate and debate the issues properly so inevitably such intervention will be via over simplified solutions that often make things worse. The problem with this is that execs do not see what is happening. If they did they would be impressed and pleased with what is going on, but uneasy about the risks and their irrelevance. What this then leads to are management culls where value is lost because the problems that are being solved are not acknowledged in the company before the cull. After the cull this all emerges as a huge and nasty surprise that the company now lacks the capability to deal with.

The lesson : not everything (in fact not much) about a business is on the balance sheet, and in the corporate world the dead have no voices.